[Disc] HC Morchok take two.

Tonight we used three healers rather than two. We wanted to run 4 but just couldn't make that happend. I was solo healing my side (Kochrum) with a warior tank, DK soaker, mage and hunter.

I feel we would have easily gotten the kill with 4 healers on and we'll have that when we come back for the kill this sunday, but we want to be able to do it with only 3 or possibly 2 healers at some point too so people can get the kill on their mains, hence this thread...

Basically this is what i do:

1) Pre-stack a full DA on my grp before the pull, get full mana and make sure to keep it up
2) He stomps once but only the tank in my grp actually soaks the dmg, removing his DA (i PW:shield both tanks of course)
3) He splits, get dragged off to the side, i shield everyone for the first stomp which is fully absorbed except on the tank and possibly soaker
4) Crystals are no problem anymore, we position ourselves so he basically throws them at us. Use PW:Shield on soakers, we take minor dmg but DA is gone
5) Second stomp generally drops people kind of low. Tank takes some extra dmg and the second crystal explodes at about the same time, bringing some people to low HP, no worries, no worries though.

--- Black phase ---
We all move to the same spot and i heal everyone using PoH to also build a nice DA stack.
I also pop shadowfiend now and hymp of hope too if i feel i'll still have enough time to heal people up anyways

6) First stomp gets pretty much fully absorbed by DA+shields except on tank/soaker
7) Second stomp hits, first crystal explodes not long after. I'm generally not able to heal people up fully before the 3rd stomp/second crystal.

This is where it starts to become hectic, so i pop Power Infusion (mostly for the second time in the fight).

8) second crystal spawns, ranged move there , i heal as much as possible, prioritizing the tank and soaker and putting shields up.
9) Third stomp
This is when i use PW:Barrier to soak the stomp and crystal. It's not unusual that we lose a player or two here.

At this point i'm doing generally between 28-31k HPS (overall for the fight on recount), am kind of low on mana and have use most of my cooldowns

--- 2nd black phase ---
As i said, i have pretty low mana now but i top people off, tank and melee helps with bandages while they can't do anything else anyways.

Last "phase" stats with full health but not much of a DA. This is also about when he gets his increased dmg, and i just can't keep up with both the the AoE and the tank dmg.

I dno how much more detail i can give without showing logs (which i havn't got). I use PW:S for rapture on the tank, meaning it's not allways up for stomp.

Here's my armory, i swapped in Fall of Mortality (+ tsunami) for the extra regen for this fight, and also swapped my Maw for the spirit/haste dagger (normal mode obviously).
I also tried respecing put of attonement as i found i didn't really have time to do anything other than spam PoH and shields :P

What's going on here? I just can't pull the numbers to make this happend, but i'm doing 30k HPS.
I'm tired and ranty atm btw, so sorry about that. Hope i can get something out of this though.
Also, sorry for the wall of text

Back to attonement, after black phase it takes ages for the boss to stomp, build up 5x evang, penance tank, spew PoH, PWS tanks. After stomp use AA and spaw more PoH, as you move to crystal spew PWS/PoM/Renew. Once at crystal watch timer and chose your spells correctly. Don't be affraid to FH if someone is very low, if everyone is fine spam more PoH. If you go oom you're casting to much in black, there's no reason to build a 60k DA stack. Also try to grab some better classes for your side since the other side has 2 healers, rogues and shadowpriests are amoung my favorite soakers (rogue=feint, shadowpriest=vamp emb).

Also after 2nd black phase try popping heroism. The Non-black phases are only like a minute long.

Get your soakers to do their job correctly. They need to soak crystals by hugging it, as it will do less dmg. Also make sure there are all in range to take Stomp hit, before running to crystal position. Try to PWS on most critical soakers like Hunters. Make sure they are using HS.

Set-up steady CD-s rotation. Barrier (you can use it twice) and Divine hymne are your own CD-s, but don’t forget to use Warrior-s Shout and Heroisam also.

I always solo heal my side as a discipline priest and i healed it with both, sos and atonement specs. both worked fine.

first of all im surprised with your stats:
* you have low mastery, yet you say that you blanket group with shields. i bet that shields are in 3 of your top healing spells on this fight. wouldnt it be better to have more mastery to support this playstyle?
* you reforge haste to crit. while its awesome to have high crit when tank healing or when healing with other healers when they can use their smart-aoe and top people who didnt get your crits, i dont find it all that good when learning to solo-heal group.

this fight is pretty much about spamming poh, stacking da and shielding.
what is dangerous in this kind of fights, is that we get used to spamming poh and shields.
make sure that you dont just spam poh when whole group has shields debuffs and one person is on 40% hp while all the others are on 90+%. make sure that you actually switch to penance, gheal or fheal to top the one low person first.

as for shielding, i dont see a reason of shielding whole group when there is no need for it. i just shield tank and melle soaker before the stomp (assuming everyone is topped and with some da) so other people dont have shield debuff when going for crystal (meaning i still have my emergency instant way to save them if something goes wrong). i also always put pom on soaker before the stomp.

I don't like the idea of DA stacking during intermissions. In a situation where you really NEED the extra cushion as a spiking mechanic, fine. But since kohcrom goes stomp-stomp-crystal-stomp (etc) first stomp which nullifies your stacked DA is the easiest one to heal up after anyway. You should have time to just heal out the first stomp with time remaining to blanket PW:S before first crystal.

At my gearlevel, DA stacking with PoH is only about 4 HPM, very bad. PW:S is around 7 without rapture.

if youre really running probs with mana, if you havent got the 4pc t13 (which armoury doesnt say you are) do you have 2pc t12 kicking around in your bags?

i run A/A spec with 2pc12, 2pc 13 and 2k spirit and genreally finish the fight on close to 80-90%mana. if youre on the side which is solo healing, do you have a rogue available? rogues soaking with feint makes healing very easy

It sounds to me you are trying too hard to build up DA shields using PoH instead of just getting everyone's health up via GH/Pennance. Time your PW:S so that the duration of Weakened Soul will be gone so you have time to put another round of PW:S on ppl before the second stomp. When I solo heal my side PW:S accounted for about 50% of my total healing, it is an absurd amount of healing.

There is no need to mastery stack I could easily do it with just 13% mastery and even then people where only getting hit for around 10% on each stomp due to DA alone in most cases. You could mastery stack if you wanted to but doing it just for this fight and to purely pad the meters is a waste of both time and gold, if your having issues try it but other wise it's not needed our absorbs are op atm even without stacking mastery.

My play style for this fight is to dump mana as it's such a short fight you should have more then enough regen with the cooldowns we have to last it, so I pretty much shield up the soakers before the stomp and shield the rest for the crystal then stack DA in between.

About the stats: The issue is I don't really want to change it too much for this fight only. I've considering going more mastery heavy but it makes a lot less sense for me on most other fights.

As for DA stacking, I only do it before the pull. What i meant about the black phases is that i heal people with PoH and then just keep whatever DA up that i got built healing them from ~30%. This absorbs basically the whole first stomp on everyone but the tank.
Of course i use other heals when it makes more sense but i use PoH whenever 3-4 people are damaged both for efficiency and to stack (and keep up) the DA

Soakers are doing their job fine (positioning etc). I suppose they could use their personal cooldowns more effectively. i'll talk to them about it.

It just felt so strange to me to do 30k HPS and still not be able to keep up while other healers (youtube vids) make it look easy...

One more thing, just throwing this out there... is it possible to totally avoid the stomps by leaping the tank out of range (28 yards i believe)? :P
Lifegrip, warrior leap and their charge to friendly thing should be enough to do that.

I play in a 25man raiding guild however, it is still incredibly similar for this fight. You pretty much want to ensure you are doing the following:
-- Keep a Shield on the tank
-- Keep Shields on your groups before stomps/crystal soaking (Remember not to presheild before black phase because that is a waste of mana)
-- Use your hymn or conc pot in black phase to ensure you won't oom.
-- Ensure rapture is staying on cd (this is pretty much done by the tank but also when a stomp / soak happens)
-- Precast a PoH when he begins casting a stomp and top the groups up with PoH.
-- Dont spend time stacking DA when the fight is already engaged, just use shields instead.
-- Use blackphase to passively get mana back. The first stomp after black phase isn't for some time so you do have time to sit there before stacking shields.
This fight is incredibly short so make sure you use your shadowfiend at the most opportunistic time (Power Torrent proc, hymn of hope ect)

By leaping the tank out of stomp, the stomp will deal that much more damage to the rest of soaking people. Stomp has fixed amount of damage it deals to people in 20y(?) around him.

So if the whole group takes 500k dmg, everyone takes 100k dmg per stomp.
If you pull tank out of it (it means you are not eating the stomp either) means that the 3 people that remained around him will be hit for 500k (cca 166k dmg per person). Two of those people will get hit for double the damage beceause of the heroic mechanics, meaning one person will get hit for 166k, two for 332k in this example. Not easy to heal through right?
If just one or two people stay in the range of his stomp when rest of the group runs away he(she) is going to die. I am not so sure what would happen if nobody was in range of his stomp, but this would force your group to be in constant movement, totally gimping raid dps.

Just heal through the damage using cooldowns when health starts dipping low (Barrier, tank 4 piece if your tank has it, power infusion, divine hymn... do not be afraid to ask your fellow raid members for help)

Btw I am A/A specced with only 9 mastery and 2k spirit and I solo heal Kochrom side just fine.

Just stack your group with better classes (less squishy!). DK (lets say frost), mage, hunter and warrior tank... No armor buff (which is huge on a boss that pretty much only does physical damage) and DK/hunter/mage are pretty squishy. DKs can AMS crystals, but he's not on crystalduty. Hunters have a larger healthpool due to the stamina talents in the first tier of SV - but Im not sure if there are better DPS alternatives, I dont play a hunter. Either way they dont have a static damage reduction afaik (shadowpriests and boomkins are king for this, and youll get 5% haste from them). Mages will die fast unless they have frost armor on, and lets face it: he doesnt.

No 5% haste either, no 5% crit unless Im mistaken. No replenishment. That's 3 pretty important buffs (especially as youre having manaissues). Im assuming the morchok group have no problems whatsoever, so cherrypick the best players from there. Dont know what your 2nd tank is but if you have access to a druid with 4set that would be amazing. Remember that while Morchok gets the crystal-stomp-crystal etc at the beginning the mirrorgroup gets the same in the middle of the fight, and youve recognized the point where people are going down. Popping beartranq for that is amazing. Also, rogues. Feint is overpowered or maybe just buggy because our rogue seems to take alot less damage than he should (or PW S is jsut that good I guess)

Also, it's extremely important that the warrior keeps thunderclap/demo shout up for 100% of the time. Check the logs or even recount. 10% less damage and 20% slower attackspeed will do alot.

Finally, with 31k effective HPS (dont know if you have random slumps in activity skewing the numbers, again logs will help with this) is more than enough by far. Our disco priest does less than that and has no problems keeping us up

Edit: Not to jump on the druid-tank bandwagon (I play one myself so Im a tad bit biased) but remember that the passive 10-14k armor a druid has over a warrior isnt trivial at all. CtC might be good against melee hits, but stomp cant be blocked.

About the stats: The issue is I don't really want to change it too much for this fight only. I've considering going more mastery heavy but it makes a lot less sense for me on most other fights.

the mastery, i only suggested it as your first post made me think that you quite heavily rely on shields. i believe that best stats for a given discipline priest are the stats that bonus this particular priest' playstyle most

About the leap from stomp thing... What i was thinking was more like you only have one tank, one healer and two ranged dps on that side.

Healer and dps would stack at the crystals and the tank would make sure to keep the boss far away enough so that they don't take any dps. Then whenever he stomps, the tank would leap/get leaped/charge out of range, avoid all the dmg then pick him up again.

(other side would do the fight as you normally would)

Might be complicated, but it should make the fight a joke to solo heal :P

To be honest with you trying to dodge the stomp by pulling the tank out of it is just asking for a wipe plus you can only pull it off maybe twice per fight, it's best just to get used to the damage and heal through it as normal and if shit happens and the dps soaker dies then consider using a pulling mechanic to avoid wiping.

By the way the fight already is a joke to heal for Disc priests, myself and our Druid are both equally geared and skilled I would go as far as to say he is more skilled then myself considering he also has the job of raid leading so he is on top of most mechanics but when it comes to Morchok he is finding that he can't output enough healing to counter the damage incoming solo where as I tend to have an easy time of it due to Disc absorbs negating a good majority of the damage and preventing situations where people are even close to death.

Are you guyz 4-healing it? Cause it makes the fight alot easier.
In my guild now that its on farm i solo heal the side with 2 Crystal because our rogue goes sub and we get the damage reduction from him. But yeah when you are progressing on this fight the easiest way to do it is definetly 4-healing.

tank, paladin/shaman healer with shield and tank specced DPS (so DPS who just uses a tank spec but DPS gear) on kohcrom, rest on morchok.

basically, by doing this, the damage on morchok becomes nearly negligible (83-166K before reduction), and the kohcrom damage is also easier to manage (due to it hitting more average armor and better DR).

Well we used 4 healers tonight and nearly one-shot him (rouge forgot to use a cooldown once and we wiped >_<).

We won't be able to run that setup every time though.

I like the idea of the tactic posted above but i'm not sure if it's possible with our available class mix. We'll think of ways to make this easier. I actually think the tactic i mentioned above where you completely avoid stomps on one side could work